Late yesterday, Microsoft announced that Exchange Server 2007 had been …

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Microsoft announced on Thursday afternoon that Exchange Server 2007 has finally been released to manufacturing. The first beta of Exchange 2007, then known as Exchange 12, was released last December and the product saw one more beta release in late July.

Compared to its predecessor, Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007 has several enhancements and welcome additions. Some of those features include:

Unified Messaging

Increased maximum limit for storage groups and mail databases

Integrated spam, virus, and phishing protection

Now a native 64-bit application

No maximum database size

Outlook Web Access 2007 (OWA)

Updated management console user interface

New command line interface

The product's RTM announcement was made on the Microsoft Exchange blog yesterday. Exchange team leader Terry Myerson said that Microsoft is already using Exchange 2007 for many of its company mailboxes.

We've bet the company on this product. Here at Microsoft, we have over 120,000 mailboxes running in production on Exchange 2007—exceeding our SLA of 99.95% availability. Likewise, over 200 Technology Adoption Partners and Rapid Deployment Partners have over 55,000 mailboxes in production operating within their enterprise SLA's.

Henrik Walther, who runs a blog at MSExchange.org, said that the RTM bits should be available sometime soon—possibly today. There's no word as to when it will be available to MSDN subscribers.

Does your company run Exchange Server? If so, are there any plans to upgrade to Exchange 2007 in the near future? According to a recent article on Microsoft TechNet, Exchange 2007 should save businesses US$5 million per year. I suppose we'll find out soon enough if there's any truth behind that statement.